Ask HN: As a grad student from non-CS background how did you learn programming?

2 pointsggr23421 comment

Grad students who have never programmed before and are from a domain totally unrelated to Computer students often have to learn it on their own due to their grad school work.

If you are someone that fits this criteria, where did you learn it from and why?

View on HN

I was hired by Travelocity a bazillion years ago as a designer. They could hire designers easily but they couldn’t hire competent front end developers at all as those such people were purple unicorns. One day they told me I am now a developer and I just had to figure it out. I bought a book about the DOM and taught myself how to program JavaScript from the perspective of data structures, tree models, and existing standard APIs. I taught myself to write code in the style of JSLint because at the time it was the only static analysis for the language and stressed safety over convenience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com